Is it worth recasting dots as a shadow priest in general? Both my trinkets tend to have their procs active at the same time providing a sizeable chunk of about 6k intellect, not really sure if its worth it or if i should ignore it, have first haste cap but no set bonuses yet. Also wondering if the new insanity is better then FDCL on single target.

At the end of "II. Talents" you link "Lux and Umbra", a priest mechanics guide, which contains outdated information (it claims to be updated in Februa 28th (5.1) but there is some information in there that was outdated in Cata.

Well that's Nysem's deal. Truth is they took a break from Priesting but may be getting back into it.

While some of it is outdated it's the most up today resource of it's kind that I'm aware of. If you could provide a link to a better resource or could contribute to that thread's information I would be quite appreciative.

Well sometimes thing like that happen, might be a regular one-time bug. I once hat that pet-heal hot on my hunter with a duration of ~7500 days left and ticking for ten times the amount it should, couldn't ever explain that either and unfortunately it ended when the pet died a few days later

I tried to math out how likely it would be to occur but the significant figures became wayyy too small for my calculator, I could use excel but I'm lazy - I got far enough into it though to figure out the chances must literally be something like one in a million O.O

Too bad it didn't happen on a boss for you, then you would hold the top WoL on that fight for the rest of the expansion

Hey couple of questions.
I feel I'm a tad behind in info as my guild died during t14 and I'm just getting back into raiding again and did not keep up with the theory crafting. (switched from 25m to 10m also, so any info there would be great)

Should I be gemming Reckless, Energized and Quick rather then Brilliant, Purified and Reckless ?

Should I replace my H+8 Light of the Cosmos with the Volatile Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault or just grab the cloak next

Also I'm a human using a mace and getting all my hit from spirit.
Ingame my hit looks like this
but the armory has me at 16%. Ingame right or armory ?

lastly I've seen a few priests going haste > Mastery > crit, thoughts ? is this for 1 fight where they are pushing HMs or has mastery outpaced crit ?

How good would the 522 VP trinket be for shadow priests in general? My current ones are a 476 relic of yu'lon and a 489 light of the cosmos.

The VP trinket has a colossal amount of Int on it and is thus very good for any situation, it will be a clear upgrade to either of those trinkets you have

I recommend replacing your Relic with Light + VP trinket It should be about a 2-3k dps upgrade for you.

---------- Post added 2013-03-27 at 10:31 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Volitar

I've also wondered about this as well. I see a lot people switching to mastery over crit and a lot of people staying crit so I decided to try mastery and I'm really liking it.

My logic is with 4set mastery becomes a better choice.

anyone else have thoughts on the subject?

Sorry, I wrote up a response to this on another browser tab and then I guess never posted it :/

As you all know, critical shadow word: pain ticks have a synergy in which they spawn Shadowy Apparitions, and Shadowy Apparitions have a synergy with our 4 piece in which they have a 65% chance to extend our DoT durations by 3 seconds.

Alternately, Mastery procs additional DoT ticks - which can provide other synergies with minor Divine Insight and From Darkness, Comes Light - as well as providing additional chances for Pain ticks, which can then crit and spawn a Shadowy Apparition - feeding into the above crit and 4-piece synergies. Mastery of course also procs of Mind Sear, Mind Flay, and Mind Flay(Insanity) - while crit benefits all spells equally (Mind Blast, Death, Halo etc do not benefit from Mastery). So if your interest is in getting more Shadowy Apparitions - generally higher mastery will provide more Apparitions than higher Critical rating (except for very small values of Crit) - higher Apparitions will give you more GCDs (fewer DoT reapplications) and more GCDs are very beneficial for many fight types.

Mastery will also increase your Mass AOE damage via Mind Sear at almost a 2:1 ratio compared to the impact of Crit on Mind Sear. This is because while it takes 600 crit rating for 1%, it takes only about half that... 333 I believe... mastery for 1% more procs - so for the same value of Mastery you are gaining almost twice the added ticks (where 2 ticks for 10k damage - mastery - are equivalent to 1 critical tick for 20k damage).

This means that for Mass AOE fights, Mastery is the clear winner.

For Divine Insight and From Darkness Comes Light, the benefit of higher mastery is often deceptive to people. Say you have 25% chance of mastery replicating your DoT tick - but only a 5% of chance of that added DoT tick proccing Divine Insight (DI's proc chance is 5%). This means that mastery-based DI procs add about 1.25% chance of DI procs with 25% mastery - combined with the 5% base chance, you have a 6.25% chance of a Pain tick proccing DI (either it procs DI, or it procs a mastery tick which then procs a DI). If you reforged 1500 stat weights to have 25->30% mastery, that 1.25% chance rises to 1.5% - so your overall DI proc chance rises from 6.25% to 6.5% per tick of Shadow Word: Pain: a ~4% increase in DI proc rate you experience. It's not nothing, but it should illustrate how little mastery actually benefits your proc specs, 1500 additional mastery will only give you a quarter of one percent increase in DI proc rate (0.25%).

Because of this, without the set bonus, Mastery wasn't a great stat outside of mass AOE (Mind Sear, mentioned above), and even then - our burst AoE level 90 talents ignored our Mastery entirely and favoured Crit exclusively over both Mastery and Haste rating: and they can often account for about as much AoE damage as Mind Sear itself.

With the set bonus, these two relatively comparable stats are getting thrown out of balance - the set bonus heavily favours mastery over crit - and where before they were roughly equal, now mastery (once you have 2pc) should definitely be the preferred choice for pretty much all encounters. I should probably try to make this more concise and jam it into my first post! ^^